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Mandrakelinux Goes X.org
dvalin writes "With Mandrakelinux now going for X.org it seems like every big linux distributor now has officialy dumped XFree86.
First release for cooker was announced on the changelog list the 7th of June:
http://archives.mandrakelinux.com/changelog/2004-0 6/msg00799.php
Nice to see for all us cookers out there:)
Also on another note, Mandrakelinux has also switched to gcc-3.4 now"
anyone knows if/when x.org will make it to debian experimental/unstable ?
i don't want to build mine because the next apt-get dist-upgrade may overwrite x.org with xfree86, so i'm waiting for the packages. i just want to know how long i'll have to wait.
What ? Me, worry ?
People are switching to X.org due to liscence incompatbilities of XFree86 with the GPL.
Actually, Xorg is just a fork of XFree86 right before the licence change.
"Victory means exit strategy, and it's important for the President to explain to us what the exit strategy is." G.W.Bush
In the keyboard section you have to replace XkbRules "xfree86" with XkbRules "xorg"
GCC is still 3.4.0.
GCC 3.4.1 is targeted for June 15.
and now X-windows on Fedora runs alot faster. I'm happy to see the distros leaving Xfree86
This page probably can.
blah
Xorg is a fork of XFree86 due to a change in licensing on XFree86 software. Apparently the XFree license has had a 'marketing/advertising' clause added to it which may make it incompatible with the GPL. That was the straw that broke the camel's back..... From what I've read, their has been a lot of friction for a long time between XFree leadership and development community for various reasons (too many to list here). You can get the details about Xorg from here.
Its great to see another distro adopt x.org as the cornerstone of their distro.
When XORG 6.7.0 was released, to put it midely, i was running around the house naked celebrating with great joy knowing that finally X11 will be bought kicking and screaming into the 21st century in regards to performance.
With the heavy weight of the distros plus SUN, hopefully SUN will stop having their own in house X server and instead adopt the XORG. What this should mean is greater enhancements coming to Solaris and all platforms that rely on XORG.
What I am disappointed in, however, is the lack of movement by FreeBSD to getting XORG working. A known bug that has been sitting in bugzilla since last month still hasn't been fixed, whats taking FreeBSD so long?!
and replace
blah
It's NetBSD. Just fire up "vipw" and edit the passwd file manually ;)
(they might have recently added a "useradd" command, but traditionally have not had one, in their minimalist style)
whinging is an actual word...
Tom.
Oh arse
I don't know about FreeBSD, but NetBSD choose to go with XFree86 4.4, OpenBSD would not accept the license. Currently OpenBSD uses are pre-release of 4.4 from just before the new license was introduced. I don't think the OpenBSD teams has decided what to do yet.
In case the parent post is a little confusing, Fedora Core 2 uses Xorg as the X-server and XFCE is one of the available WMs (along with the usual Gnome, KDE etc).
:)
I'd have to agree that XFCE is a very compact, tidy and high-performance WM. Great for low-end boxes and even power-users who don't want to loose potential gaming resources to a WM
Ripping an new rectum in the fabric of spacetime.
xorg is still pretty much to stock XF86, so you're not going to gain/lose anything by early adopting. Later, it'll become a big deal.
"Victory means exit strategy, and it's important for the President to explain to us what the exit strategy is." G.W.Bush
Try this Wikipedia article, lots of links about it. Also check some bookstores out, there are countless books on how X works and how to program for it.
Nero-burning ROM for Linux!
I read that in the next release there will be compositing implemented, right now though, there isn't much difference but some packages in X.org are updated that aren't in XFree 4.4. Xorg is the future, it's an X server that is actually put under an OPEN development model and patches are accepted, where XFree was not.
Actually, the license change means no work by XFree86 can be used in X.org.
The package revision is 0.1mdk. That means it is not yet the first real release of the package, but a pre-release. The changelog also clearly indicates it is a CVS copy of GCC. Once GCC 3.4.1 is officially out, and the package has been stabilized, the package release will become 1, and increase as other changes/improvements are made to the package.
Due to the licensing incompatibilities, I wouldn't be surprised to see little or no XFree86 development make it into X.org. Given that there's little to no XFree86 development to start with, that means that in the grand scheme of things XFree86 is dead. On the other hand, since X.org is a fork of XFree86, and most of the good XFree86 devs have moved over to it, you could make the argument that XFree86 just changed its name to X.org.
"If English was good enough for Jesus, it's good enough for everyone else."
OpenBSD for one is likely to change. They were one of the biggest opponents of the new XFree86 license.
The reasoning for why the new license sucks has absolutely nothing to do with the GPL, despite the uninformed ramblings of the Slashdot crowd. It has to do with practicality. The new XFree86 license is almost impossible to follow depending on your interpretation. The license itself is unclear, and instead of fixing the wording, XFree86 leaders have just made informal statements on mailing lists regarding their own personal interpretation.
The new license is impractical because it requires that attribution to be given to the XFree86 developers wherever any other attribution is given to another party. OpenBSD's complaint was with CD covers. Say you put a "Artwork provided by Foo Bob" on the CD insert. Now, according to some interpretations of the XFree86 license (and these are valid interpretations, because the license wording is very ambiguous and vague) you'd also have to put there in the same font size and prominance, "X Window system provided by XFree86, Inc." Then, if a contributor adds some stuff to the project under the same license, you have to add their name as well. And the next contributor. And so on. Pretty soon you run out of space to put all of these. There's also potential for the license to "spread" as people lift code, resulting a wide variety of apps with hundreds if not thousands of authors that have this incredibly stupid licensing stipulation.
The XFree86 developers have stated that the above scenario is not their intention. But what they say doesn't matter much, because the above is pretty much exactly what the license text implies.
WTF are you talking about ???
X.org is an X server, which is similar to what you have inside your NCD thing (except the NCD is stuck at XFree86 4.1.x
X.org itself doesn't communicate with your NCDs, the Xlib in your server does (where the X applications, also known as X clients, reside).
the xlib that comes with X.org does not break compatibility, and still uses the core X protocol (it's X11R6.x), otherwise, it wouldn't be an X 11 library.
Now, your NCD things are flash upgradable. you should kick NCD in the nuts for not making a newer firmware available for that expensive hardware you use.
As for us, we have switched from NCD based X servers to EPIAs booting from the network with PXE...
"Is it compatible with the XFree86 config files?"
:-).
Yes. I simply copied my XFree86 config file over to the new name.
No changes I'm aware of to configuration methods yet, so it's probably not "better" in that sense. However, now that things are more open, if support develops for some better method that's proposed there's every chance it could happen
"I object to doing things that computers can do." -- Olin Shivers, lispers.org
As I said, You don't know what you are talking about. the core stuff won't EVER change, all new stuff goes into these really practical things called "X extensions" which are some sort of plugins that can be used when available, or simulated if not present.
now, stop trolling and go do your homework before whining, you have a lot to read on xorg.freedesktop.org
Based on the date of your review (April), and the fact you downloaded the isos, I can only assume you did this review based on the "Community Edition". This was never intended to be the final version, and in a lot of ways WAS supposed to be beta. Maybe the Official version would work better for you..
Xlib is not part of the X server, it's part of the X client. They communicate via the X protocol. If either X.org or XFree86 make changes to the protocol that the other doesn't follow we could be in big trouble (unless it's of the form "Does the server support extension blah? If so then use it."). They would be nuts to do this because Sun, HP, Apple, etc all have their own servers and client libraries and *must* interoperate with each other and linux, not to mention 10-year-old statically linked applications.
Since XOrg will be replacing XFree, APT dependencies will have a "Replaces: xserver-xfree86" field along with the "Conflicts:" field. Don't worry, things like this happen more often than you think.
Funny how Xfree86, which started as a liberal spin-off of the "de jure" X Foundation, only to become the de facto standard for this foundation later on, now finds itself buried in bureaucracy and licensing problems, and getting passed by, no other than, the "new, exiting" X.org foundation.
:-)
(Lots of letters and commas in that sentence
"We can confirm that Debian does *not* ship the version with the trojan horse. Our version predates it." [CA-2002-28]
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
Actually, instead of "XF86Config-4", the standard name is now "xorg.conf".
Solution: Spawn of Debian. Take what is probably the best distro out there and preconfigure it and add some administration utilities and you get the best of both worlds. Examples: MEPIS, Knoppix, Lindows (Linspire), the late Corel Linux, etc...
If X.ORG is marked as conflicting with XFree86, then apt will uninstall XFree86 for me -- along with everything that depends on it. KDE, Gnome, all my X applications... ack!
Assuming you're using Debian (since you mentioned apt), those packages don't depend on XFree86. They depend on one or more of the X11 library packages, which at present are built from the XFree86 sources. A hypothetical future Debianized x.org will provide the same packages, thus ensuring that the dependencies continue to be satisfied. No applications should require rebuilding, because the XFree86 libraries and x.org libraries provide the same API.
Personally, I'm not touching x.org until it gets as far as Debian's testing stream. The XFree86 server and libraries in Debian testing Work For Me(tm), so I'm in no hurry to replace them just because.
-Stephen
I've mentioned this elsewhere, but the problems I found were:
Mandrake 10:
- Kdevelop crashes on startup (there's a simple workaround, but it's a pretty obvious bug they should have fixed before official)
- installer and drakconf lock up with some USB mice connected, so the configuration tools were unusable for me.
- Hard freezes on startup and shutdown
SuSE 9.1
- Firefox crashed on me a lot (much more than with other distros)
- overly long boot time (five times as long as my current system)
- USB keyboard and mouse randomly wouldn't work on boot (about 1 in 15 boots, no problems in other distros apart from Mdk)
- random lockups when powering off due to sound card module problem, plus odd static from speakers (again, not seen with any other distro)
The USB and Kdevelop problems are reported in Mdk's anthill bug system for both 9.2 and 10.0 by many people. I don't know about the SuSE bugs, I was too fed up by then to bother, I just wiped it and reinstalled Arch.
Of the two, SuSE was better, but neither of the two gave had any killer features that made it worth struggling with the problems, when there are many perfectly good free alternatives. They were both very good-looking distros that I would have liked to have used, but until the bugs are gone I'd rather have something that works.
If Xfree was cross platformable, then I don't see why x.org wouldn't be. Remember, it's a fork. Think Xfree86 + improvements + future updates
"We're breaking out the ramen noodles. . . "
"Really? Is it someone's birthday?"
SuSE.
It passed my "Dad" test (only because he knows what user accounts are).
Good names really do help grease the wheels.
When we forked Inkscape from Sodipodi, we gave a lot of careful thought to branding, and over the course of the project it's paid off in a lot of small ways.
Of course branding doesn't determine the long-term success of a project; there are a lot of successful projects which are even agressively BADLY branded (e.g. GIMP, or (IMO) Sodipodi). Long-term a project stands or falls by its technical, legal, and organizational merits.
But in the short term branding is often the thing that gives you those little critically needed boosts at the right times.
Don't think that cuddly penguin hasn't helped Linux.
DNA just wants to be free...
XF86 isn't broken, it isn't slow when compiled right either(okay only gentoo does it right all the time).
It is quite broken. You know when they added multi-moniter support, it broke the extension for hardware video? To get around it, they hacked it so it only works on the primary screen.
How about how Xine has to simulate a keypress every so often to prevent the screensaver from coming on? That, my friends, is a hack.
It has several advanced features that no other GUI system uses. Transparent network support at the top of the list.
That doesn't make up for anything. Fans always bring this up. "B-but, it's network-transparent!" Y-Windows is network transparent too.
That's right you don't have to load a whole desktop to use one app you can just load the app.
Uh, hello? I have to install both entire desktop libraries and base packages. That's what I was talking about. Read, learn, comprehend. I have to install KDE's base system to be able to run some app that happened to be coded for KDE. Instead of implementing one sane development library, a bunch of idealists have decided the more choice, the better--having absolutist views and applying them to everything is why Linux is still only at 1% of usage on Google Zeitgeist. The nearest is OS X up about 4 points (so much for that article declaring that Linux desktop usage would surpass the Mac...).
"Sufferin' succotash."